Three Decades of Linguistics at SJSU: Local and Global Challenges

Thirty years ago, the first M.A. degree in Linguistics was awarded at SJSU. Over the three decades since then, the fledgling program has grown into a department that this year has more than twenty graduates of three degree programs: a B. A. and an M.A. in linguistics and an M.A. in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). These graduates join a community of language professionals around the world who have addressed both local and global language challenges.

Local challenges were the focus of the early linguistics courses offered at SJSU in the 1950s and 60s as part of teacher education programs for our local public schools. For many teachers, these introductory linguistics classes were the only ones to address language used by public school students who spoke something other than standard English. Many who took such classes experienced moments of self-discovery -- becoming conscious of the systematic nature of their own dialects, languages and codeswitching.

Bilingual students became fascinated with questions surrounding language acquisition. One of those was Lily Wong Fillmore, now a professor of education at Berkeley. While still working on an interdisciplinary undergraduate degree in linguistics here in the 1960s, Lily began the first Head Start program in the county, addressing language issues facing migrant pre-school children from Spanish-speaking homes. As a graduate student at Stanford, she went on to do research on the acquisition of English by Spanish-speaking children in Watsonville, where she herself as an immigrant child had spoken Chinese, Spanish, and English.

In the late 1960s, linguistics courses began to take on a more global focus with the addition of new faculty. A summer program to train Peace Corps volunteers for the Philippines was held at SJSU, and two of its teachers were hired to teach in the English Department here: Estrella Calimag, a native of the Philippines, and Philip Cook, whose wife Letty was also a native. They joined professors from several departments who offered an interdisciplinary major in linguistics to a few students. These early professors were Edith Trager and Don Alden from English, Kingsley Noble from Anthropology, Mike Schmidt from Philosophy, and others from various foreign language programs. By 1970, the faculty who had been working informally together with individual students had gained approval for a graduate degree program in linguistics and hired two faculty members specifically for that program: John Lamendella, a new Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, and Rebecca Agheyisi, a native of Nigeria completing her dissertaion on West African Pidgin English at Stanford.

I can still remember the excitement of seeing the announcement for the new degree program, which offered a course in Yoruba, a language spoken in West Africa. In the introductory course with Edith Trager, I had already learned about the creole, Gullah, spoken in my native South Carolina and had written a short paper on it. Edith had lent me her own copy of Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect by Lorenzo Dow Turner, which I devoured, so I knew that the opportunity to learn Yoruba (as one of the languages contributing to the structure of Gullah) was not to be missed. When I walked into Rebecca Agheyisi's first class, I felt at home. For two years I studied Yoruba and took my first sociolinguistics class with her. Scholarly work on a subject that resonated with my own life became a possibility -- as it has for so many of the students who have gone through the program here. She helped me get admitted to the Linguistics Program at Stanford, where Charles Ferguson taught a course on creole languages in the first semester I was there, thus linking my personal interest in a local language spoken in my backyard with the global phenomenon of creole languages around the world.

My former classmates in the SJSU linguistics program have also used their SJSU degree to pursue local and global interests related to language. Chieko Nakazato, now retired as a professor of English at Chiba University in Japan, has spent her professional life incorporating spoken English into the curriculum in Japanese education. Another classmate, Graham Thurgood, obtained his Ph.D. at UC-Berkeley and has done research on the Chamic languages of Vietnam. Today he chairs the Linguistics Program at CSU-Chico in California. A fourth, Doug Adamson, taught English in Spain and then did a Ph.D. at Georgetown University, with research on applied linguistics; he is now on the English faculty at the University of Arizona. Another student who finished her M.A. here two years after we did is probably the most famous graduate: Amy Tan. Through her novels about conflicts between immigrant parents and their Americanized children, she has touched the lives of many immigrant families. If you look carefully at the dialogue in The Joy Luck Club and at her essay "Mother Tongue," you will understand how her study of linguistics has informed her understanding of the frequent role reversals between parent and child, as the child negotiates telephone and interview exchanges for the parent in the English-speaking world.

By the end of the seventies, the attention of the Linguistics Program had once again turned to local challenges, this time within the university itself, as great numbers of immigrants began attending SJSU because of changes in immigration laws coupled with the fall of Saigon. In 1979, when the English Department began offering a remedial composition program for what it thought would be mostly Chicano and Black students, faculty found, instead, large numbers of second language students in their classes. By the mid 1980s, one third of all SJSU students spoke a language other than English as a child. The majority of linguistics M.A. students were now taking a concentration in TESOL to prepare themselves for teaching ESL classes in local community colleges and language schools abroad. Some continued to pursue theoretical linguistics and to enter Ph.D. programs, while still others began working in the growing computer-based industries in Silicon Valley. A few taught languages like Chinese and Japanese in local colleges or in Saturday heritage language classes for children.

By 1990 the scope of the university's ESL challenge became so obvious that faculty and administration began to talk about establishing a Department of Linguistics and Language Development that would address this issue, and in 1991 such a department was born. Faculty joined from the old linguistics program, the English department, and the College of Education, and four new members were hired specifically for their expertise in TESOL: Martha Bean, B. Kumaravadivelu, Peter Lowenberg, and Denise Murray. A new M.A. degree was created in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. In addition to the degree programs, the new department was given responsibility for teaching all freshmen students placing below a certain score on the statewide English Placement Test -- about half of whom spoke English as a second language. The LLD faculty decided to mix native and non-native speakers in these classes, which were re-named Academic English in order to give equal emphasis to both reading and writing skills. The thinking was that native and non-native speakers alike would benefit from this joint language experience. Creating the Language Development Center and devising curriculum for it and the classes challenged faculty and students alike. Graduate students were soon tutoring and later teaching in the Academic English program. Many of our finest teachers in LLD today have an M.A. in TESOL from the department, having learned on the job how to apply what they were learning in classes -- and then helping to train later generations of students to do the same. Academic English classes for upper division transfer students were added, as the university began to address language challenges at every level. In addressing the local ESL challenge within the university, where over than 50% of students are now non-native English speakers, we have learned that we share this challenge with local community college where many of our graduates now teach. Some teach at both SJSU and at community colleges, as well as in the pre-college program at SJSU known as Studies in American Language (SAL). A handful of our graduates also teach in the public school and many in adult education programs, thus providing continuity in language development classes for immigrants who enter the country at any age.

At the height of the dot.com boom during the 90s, a number of linguistics B.A. and M.A. majors used their linguistic skills in high tech industries, even while they were attending school. Today, with the slowdown in the economy, those positions are not as plentiful. The swing back and forth between theoretical and applied linguistics is a long-standing one and a healthy one -- just as is the swing back and forth between local and global language issues. Today, graduates in LLD are prepared to learn how to cope with whatever new challenge comes their way. Note the word LEARN. They have learned here how to learn what they need to know. We cannot predict what kinds of jobs they will find themselves in, or what exactly they will need to know. If past experience is any guide, they will choose some local issue that touches their hearts and see in it the global implications. Whatever they end up doing will be a surprise, both to them and to us. Linguistics is not a predictable field -- and that is part of its joy.

~by Pat Nichols,Professor Emerita SJSU

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